Project planning in Excel: how far does it actually get you?

Search for "project planning excel" and you find two kinds of pages. One offers a free template. The other explains why Excel is not good enough, and is written by a company selling planning software. Neither answers your question, because your question is not whether Excel is perfect, but whether it is good enough for your situation.

The honest answer: a project plan in Excel works fine as long as one person maintains it and not much changes. It breaks the moment a second person has to read or edit it. That is the real breaking point, not the number of tasks or the size of the project.

How do you build a project plan in Excel?

At its core you put tasks in rows and time in columns, then colour in the cells where a task runs. That is a Gantt chart, and Excel does it well enough.

In practice this setup works best:

• One row per task, not per subtask, otherwise it becomes unreadable
• Columns per week rather than per day, unless you genuinely plan at day level
• A column with the owner, because a task without a name does not happen
• A column with the status, with three values and no more
• A start date and an end date as separate columns, so you can sort

Conditional formatting does the rest. You do not need a template from the internet, and most templates are too complicated for what an agency actually does.

When is Excel simply the right choice?

More often than the planning software vendors admit. Excel is fine if you mostly recognise yourself in this:

• You work alone or with one other person
• You have a handful of live projects at a time
• The plan changes weekly at most
• You are the only one updating it
• Your client does not need to look at it

In that situation, buying a tool is mostly work. You pay, you configure, you migrate, and afterwards you have the same overview you had before. The same applies to client management, which I wrote about in running a CRM in Excel.

Where does a project plan in Excel break down?

On four points, and they almost always arrive in this order.

The file fragments. Someone emails the plan, someone else fills in their own version, and there are two truths. Storing it online partly solves this, but even then people rarely work in the same file.

Changing it costs more time than planning it. One project slips by a week and you spend half an hour dragging cells around. Excel does not know that tasks depend on each other, so you are the calculator.

You can no longer see who is overloaded. For agencies this is the painful one. Each project plan is correct on its own, but the question of whether Truus has to serve three clients this week cannot be answered without opening three files side by side. The plan is organised per project and the problem is per person.

The plan and the work drift apart. Excel holds what was supposed to happen. What actually happened lives in chat, in your inbox and in somebody's head. After a few weeks nobody trusts the file, and then it is a dead document.

That third point is usually why agencies with multiple clients stop using Excel, not the size of the projects. How to answer that weekly question properly is covered in weekly planning for busy agencies.

What is the alternative, and when do you switch?

The signal to switch is not "the plan has grown". It is one of these three:

1. Someone other than you needs to be able to update the plan 2. You need to see across clients who has how much work 3. The client asks for visibility and you do not want to send a screenshot

If none of those apply, stay with Excel and spend the money and time on something else. If two or three apply, the file is already costing you more than a tool would.

Where Wecooking fits in

Wecooking is not planning software in the sense of Gantt charts with dependencies. It solves the third problem above: project management where projects hang off clients, tasks sit with people, and you can see across all your clients what is due this week, with a client portal your client can look into. From 19 euros per month, everything included, currently free in beta.

What is not in it, and it matters for exactly this question: no time tracking and no invoicing. If you want to see hours logged against a project and turn them into an invoice in the same screen, look elsewhere. And if you plan construction projects with hard dependencies between tasks, a real planning package suits you better than we do.

If you are wondering whether your situation has crossed that breaking point, trying it for free is faster than hunting for one more template.